The Anchor Model of Musical Culture

In a recent cross-cultural study with participants from an autochthonous African population (Mafa) and Western participants, it was shown that the recognition of several emotional expressions (happy, sad, fearful) in music are likely to be music universals [1]. The Mafa listeners (who were naïve to the Western music) were quite successful at recognizing the emotional expressions in the Western music, although their own music seems not to emphasize, or even comprise this musical feature. Here I propose a model, which is aimed at illustrating how different human musical cultures intersect and “anchor” in a set of musical features that are universally perceived, while also displaying culturally acquired specifics (see Figure 2), that accounts for the Mafa results. It explains also why musical universals cannot simply be determined by specifying the common denominator between the musical features of all cultures, which may actually not exist.